SHARK & Fish Feel fight “The Battle of the Rays”

“Battle of the Rays” participants shot cownose rays with arrows from practically right on top of them.

PATUXENT, OAK ISLAND, WASHINGTON D.C.––On Saturday, June 13, 2015, dozens of men pointlessly killed perhaps hundreds of harmless cownose rays––among the smallest and most innocuous members of the shark family––near the mouth of the Patuxent River on Chesapeake Bay, Maryland.

Hosted by Fred’s Sports, self-described as “Southern Maryland’s largest hunting, fishing, & gun store, the so-called “Battle of the Rays” was not really a battle at all; ray guns are strictly a device of science fiction.

Shot from boats with compound bows, gaffed, and bludgeoned, the rays had no weapons with which to fight back.

Not even killed for fins

Blogged Humane Society of the U.S. president Wayne Pacelle nine days earlier, “It is estimated that fishermen kill between 26 and 73 million sharks every year for their fins, which are the central ingredient in shark fin soup. This staggeringly large toll has been amassed, for the most part, in regions of the world where shark finning is unregulated and the trade in fins largely unrestricted.”

(Fish Feel photo)

But killing sharks just for their fins is illegal in U.S. waters, and is further prohibited by nine coastal states. The victims of the “Battle of the Rays” and many similar ray-killing contests held in the Chesapeake Bay region are not finned––just weighed, with prizes going to whoever lands the three rays with the greatest cumulative weight, never mind how many other rays are killed before each killing team is satisfied that it has a contending trio.

While HSUS and the HSUS global arm Humane Society International have lobbied hard against shark finning, both in the U.S. and abroad, neither HSUS nor any other major animal welfare or conservation charity monitors ray-killing contests.

Fish Feel & SHARK

The “Battle of the Rays” was monitored, documented, and exposed only by Fish Feel, a barely one-year-old organization founded by longtime Washington D.C. area animal rights advocate Mary Finelli, and SHARK, founded in 1992 by former shark hunter Steve Hindi, whose 1996 essay “I was a fish killer” remains perhaps the strongest statement on record in opposition to sport fishing.

Said Hindi, scheduling a June 22, 2015 press conference at the Maryland state capital to present his findings, “Graphic undercover video documents a horrific slaughter of cownose rays, who were shot by arrows at point-blank range. The rays were then gaffed and repeatedly clubbed with bats before slowly suffocating to death.

“Hundreds of cownose rays––many of them pregnant––were mutilated, killed, and then dumped as garbage into the river,” Hindi continued. “Over a hundred bowfishers participated.”

Finelli observed the “Battle of the Rays” with fellow Fish Feel board members Howard Edelstein and Michael Gurwitz.

“We’re planning to return for the two that are scheduled for the last weekend in June, to be held in Maryland and Virginia,” Finelli told ANIMALS 24-7.

Ray in bucket. (Fish Feel photo)

“Raptors of the ocean”

“Cownose rays, a type of eagle ray, are like the raptors of the ocean,” Finelli said, “gliding through and occasionally leaping above it with their large wing-like fins. They are gentle creatures whom many people have had the pleasure of peacefully interacting with in the wild,” sometimes also featured in petting exhibits at aquariums.

“Since time immemorial they have visited the Chesapeake Bay to mate and give birth to their pups,” Finelli continued. “They take about seven years to mature, and females only have one pup a year.

“Gliding along the water’s surface,” Finelli said, “the rays are easy pickings for bowfishers. After being shot, the rays are mercilessly bludgeoned.”

At the “Battle of the Rays,” Finelli saw, “Some killers incompetently used clubs; others clumsily wielded a hammer. It was sickening to watch and to hear the rays being whacked again and again and again, their frantic wing movements slowly dying down. They were then thrown back into the water dead or dying, or piled on top of each other to suffocate.

“Party atmosphere”

“Back on shore there was a party atmosphere,” Finelli described, “with drinking and bravado while country music blared. Bloody rays were hoisted on stage, where little girls helped draw raffle tickets. Others were piled in plastic containers, garbage dropped on top of them.

“The wanton killing of these benign beings is disapproved by both scientists and government. It’s a gutless act by those with contempt of nonhuman animals and gross disrespect and ignorance of the natural world,” Finelli charged.

The pretext for ray-killing contests is the widespread but inaccurate belief that rays contribute to depleting the heavily over-collected Chesapeake Bay oyster population, which is also beleaguered by water pollution from upstream factory pig and poultry farms.

“Misunderstood species”

Says Virginia Institute of Marine Science fisheries specialist Robert Fisher, “They are definitely a misunderstood species, and unfortunately they have been labeled a villain, as far as the shellfish growers are concerned.”

Fisher found in a November 2010 report for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that oysters do not actually “make up a significant portion of the diet of cownose rays.”

Instead, Fisher’s study, summarized Janet Krenn in May 2011 for Virginia Sea Grant, “indicates that cownose rays’ mouths aren’t strong enough to crush and eat larger oysters, but this physical limitation doesn’t stop rays from trying. The result? Cownose rays pick up and swim away with large oysters, but eventually drop them after failing to crack the shells open. This behavior could help disperse large, reproductively mature oysters throughout the Bay.

Rays eat unprotected seed oysters

“Ever since 2003,” Krenn continued, “when a group of rays was seen descending on an oyster bed and eating all but a few of the newly planted oysters, industry and oyster restoration groups alike have been trying to find ways to keep rays out. According to reports, in a couple of hours those rays ate more than one million seed oysters, which were about the size of a fingernail. Fisher’s study, looking at the ray’s ability to crush oysters of various sizes, came as a response to shellfish growers’ concerns.

“If you put out unprotected seed, and rays come by,” Fisher found, “they’re going to get eaten,” but if the seed oysters are not made accessible until their shells thicken, they will not be harmed by rays.

Wrote Tom Pelton for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation later in 2011, “When California’s oyster growers launched a program to eradicate oyster-eating bat rays, the campaign appeared to backfire and cause more oyster mortality, according to ray researchers and Sonja Fordham, president of Shark Advocates International. As it turned out, the California rays were not eating many oysters, but they were eating oyster predators, such as crabs, which became more numerous.”

Elaborated Fordham, to Audubon writer Ted Williams in 2012, “The fishery is completely unregulated. This animal has one pup a year, if that. I talk to people at the seafood shows who claim cownose rays are being fished sustainably. When I ask them for evidence they say they’re a ‘nuisance.’ Well, that doesn’t make them sustainable. That’s how the coastal shark fishery got started. People saw declining swordfish and lots of sharks. So with no thought about biology, they promoted coastal shark fishing. That’s why we have species like duskies that won’t recover for a hundred years.”

Shark attacks at Oak Island

On Sunday, June 14, 2015, while Steve Hindi and Mary Finelli were triaging their videotapes and photographs of the “Battle of the Rays,” an unidentified shark or sharks made international newscasts by inflicting bites that caused two teenagers to lose limbs at Oak Island, North Carolina, about 400 miles south of Patuxent.

A 12-year-old girl from Asheboro lost part of her left arm and suffered a leg injury, while a 16-year-old boy from Colorado lost his left arm below the shoulder about an hour later, two miles away.

Horrific as the incidents were, they were extraordinarily rare. “From 1953 to 2011 there were only 103 verified great white shark attacks in California, with 12 fatalities,” according to George Burgess, head ichthyologist at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville––in other words, over 54 years about half as many total attacks and the same number of fatalities as pit bulls inflicted just in the first six months of 2015.

Burgess estimates that worldwide, humans kill about 14 million sharks for every human whom sharks kill.

To help stop this egregious animal abuse, please contact Maryland Governor Larry Hogan and ask him to put an immediate end to these killing contests:
Call: 410-974-3901 or 1-800-811-8336
E-mail: http://governor.maryland.gov/mail/default.asp

Thank you for this important, informative, eye-weeping article. I’m just so glad that Mary Finelli/Fish Feel and Steve Hindi/SHARK are documenting, protesting, and publicizing this vicious slaughter of defenseless water creatures. The festive behavior of the locals is like the behavior I remember at the Hegins Pigeon Shoot in Pennsylvania – children in strollers, rock music playing, guns blasting, pigeons wounded, dumpsters overflowing with dead birds at the end of the day. I had never heard of cownose rays until Mary Finelli explained to me who they are and the torture that awaits them when they reach the Eastern Shore. I hope the bad publicity succeeds in shaming the participants and eliminating the event. So sad.

It is quite likely that a lot of these thoroughly disgusting people consider themselves “GOOD CHRISTIANS.” Perhaps some of their fellow churchgoers and preachers could stop trying not to offend them and speak up ???

Thank you for this excellent and comprehensive article. This tournament is nothing but a spectacle of sadism and greed, perpetrated by the worst among us.

Eventually, if we cannot stop this, the cownose ray will join other species on the threatened and endangered list. Then, maybe, it will end, but the sadists and thrill-killers will surely find some other species to slaughter. It’s who and what they are.

What about the people who hunt the rays and eat them? You are targeting a select few people in your unintelligent rant! How about the nets out in the bay that trap hundreds of rays per day? How about the grass beds they are depleting that other wildlife such as ducks use as primary food sources when they migrate to the bay? You barely talked about the oyster beds they are wiping clean and how about the clam or the softcrab? When thousands and thousands of rays migrate into the bay they do damage, ask the watermen. Don’t just attack a select group of people because you googled “cow nose ray” and you think your an expert. Target the commercial fishing industry who do these things daily and on a larger scale not the weekend fisherman/ hunter.

To assert that there are “people who hunt the rays and eat them” requires documenting that such people exist. Throughout the world, the only parts of a ray that are commonly consumed are the “wings,” or fins, as part of shark fin soup, and the Maryland ray-killing contests have nothing to do with that grossly ecologically destructive trade.
The “select few people” targeted by Fish Feel and SHARK are a “select few” who choose to exercise deliberately sadistic behavior, and then to try to rationalize it with ill-informed nonsense such as the above.
The scientific data, cited in the ANIMALS 24-7 coverage, indicates that the allegation that rays harm oyster, clam, and crab populations is no more than a myth invented by so-called “watermen” to cover for their own excessive predation on species which all thrived in vastly larger numbers, along with vastly more rays, before “watermen” invaded the habitat.

New footage released today during a joint Fish Feel/SHARK press conference reveals the depth of depravity and perversion to which these “weekend fisherman/hunters” descend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2H-aY-5s6I

The founders of Fish Feel, SHARK, and ANIMALS 24-7 have all been vegan for 20-years-plus; I am a second-generation lifelong vegetarian. My adult son is the third veggie generation in our family. Apart from that, though, the waste of life by one person or group in no way justifies the waste of life compounded by sadism on the part of another.

During these tournaments typically 3 to 5 rays per team are waisted due to their nature of spoiling quickly. Most rays taken by the fisherman that are not the 3 biggest they already have are iced down immediately or their wings are removed with the carcass being put back into the environment for the thousands of scavengers in the bay to utilize. The fact is if you ever ate bay scallops at many local restaurants you are actually eating cownose ray fillets. As most articles you picked and choose what goes into the the article while leaving many other facts out. An Edita mated 6 million cownose rays enter the Chesapeake each summer, eating millions of tons of blue crabs and soft she’ll crabs as well as oysters and clams which is the main industry along the Chesapeake Bay. The cownose ray population has also been estimated to be steadily growing over the last 20 years. I’m sorry but your article is one of the most grossly misinformed articles I have read in a long time

While “Fisherman” also known as “flathead slayer” did not fully identify himself, Google search results identify him as Bowfishing Association of American social media director Louis Schwarz. Note that he acknowledges “typically 3 to 5 rays per team are ‘waisted'”; alleges mislabeling of restaurant products in a manner that the restauranteurs may contest; alleges that “An Edita mated 6 million cownose rays” through basic inattention to detail”; and concludes with several biologically implausible assertions for which he offers no sources.

You people need a life… You have probably never spent a day on the water and none the less even seen the mouth and jaws of this fish. Nor have you been bit by one. They have crushing power to crush bone in a human hand so how dare you post false statistics for personal self satisfaction in growing with lies. If they can crush bone in humans I’m positive a 3-inch adult oyster is no match. You have your way of living and that’s fine but do not impose this crap on those who enjoy this sport. Yes I said sport. Bowfishing is a growing community and vastly being destroyed by hypocrites like yourselves. hypocrites? Yes I said it you worthless beings. This is our way of living leave us alone. All of you at some point this year have probably enjoyed crabs or oysters.. They have a severe threat not cow nose Rays. If you spent a day on the water you would understand there are hundreds upon thousands in one tiny creek. Let alone the amount in the rivers and bays. You portray us to be unintentional killers. We eat these Rays we use these Rays for purpose of fertilizer to grow food. We use them for crab bait… They are all purposed. You have no right to assume we kill them based on one video of one boat who’s ice accidentally melted and the fish which btw only takes a matter of minutes at the wrong temperature to spoil into amonia based entoxins. Understand before you assume or imply. Bc if it were me in this video I would sue the videographer as well as the producer and news stations.. No one in the video gave consent. I would also like to note numerous colleges that have visited these tournament taking samples and studying these creatures and the unknown effects on the waterways… Effects that have yet to be discovered.. You have no right to assume we have no purpose.. Our purpose is thanks by the waterman everyday as they clam and try a hard earned well deserved living as these cow nose Rays fallow the boats and destroy undersized immature shellfish as a free for all. I urge you to attempt to stop us this weeknd while we legally harvest a fish that has broadcasted itself in abundance and virtually taken over our waters. We have a right to fish. You have the right to remain silent! Any and all protesters who intend to interfere with hunting these legal prey will be documented and reported to the local authorities for charges! Thank you have a nice day…

This anonymous individual seems to not understand that vegans eat neither crabs, oysters, nor any other animal; seems unaware that SHARK founder Steve Hindi was himself a nationally noted shark hunter before becoming a vegan animal advocate in 1990, as detailed at http://www.sharkonline.org/index.php/about-shark/i-was-a-fish-killer; seems unaware that SHARK and Fish Feel both documented numerous ray hunters dumping the rays they killed; and seems to have as poor a grasp of the relevant laws and biological realities as he does of both grammar and moral logic.

I witnessed the ray-killing tournament, and from the party atmosphere and blatant disregard for the rays’ suffering, it seemed the primary purpose was to engage in the sadistic killing of animals for fun and profit.

English translation: Stop these human barbarians, ban it now. That is what is in the heads of those that make policy? The manta rays have a right to the oysters and it’s an embarrassment to kill the rays that are pregnant and eat what rightfully belongs to them. (translated by Beth Clifton)